The MPAA has some interesting plans for the future: after over a decade of demand, Hollywood intends to deliver movies to customers in their homes at the same time they are released to theaters by limiting playback to DRM-infused digital outputs only through the HDCP protocol. The only problem? HDCP was just cracked.

You might already be familiar with HDCP, if you have a Blu-Ray player or a display with an HDMI input. Essentially, HDCP devices come with their own unique sets of keys that allow a device to encrypt or decrypt protected data, but with a twist: content providers can essentially revoke those encryption keys if they suspect you of foul play. HDCP’s capacity to essentially let a huge, faceless media company break functionality on your devices is obviously a big concern for DRM opponents, who identify the protocol as one of the most insidious and invasive DRM schemes yet devised.

Yet HDCP may already have been neutered, if Twitter scuttlebutt is to be believed. What this means is that perfect digital copies of any HDCP-protected content can be achieved as long as the HDMI standard does not evolve in response. This is a nightmare scenario for Hollywood, as it means that perfect digital copies of in-theater movies could start hitting torrent sites the second they are streamed online, which the industry, until now, has wanted to do simultaneously with theatrical release. If HDCP has truly been cracked, expect to see the MPAA pull back from its streaming day-one plans in fast order.